Situations arise when one wants to determine whether an article has been tampered with, opened, or altered in some way. For example, one may want to determine whether a container of food or medicine has been opened previously. The determination could be performed visually, such as by looking to see whether a seal has been broken or by looking for other visible signs of tampering. However, the container may be stored in a sealed box, so visual inspection would require opening the sealed box. In addition, a shipment may have many containers, so visual inspection might be performed on only a small sample of containers due to limits on time. Accordingly, there arises a need for a device, system, and method for determining whether an article has been tampered with, without requiring visual inspection, and which can allow for rapid determination on a large number of articles.